About connectivity of servers in a server farm

When you create a server farm in Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway, you automatically create a connectivity verifier that checks for connectivity from the Forefront TMG computer to the Web servers in the server farm. You can use any of the following types of requests to verify connectivity:

  • An HTTP or HTTPS GET request for a specified URL.
  • A PING request.
  • A request to establish a TCP connection.

If you choose to use an HTTP GET request to verify connectivity and the default setting of https://*/ for the URL on the Connectivity Monitoring page of the New Server Farm Definition Wizard, Forefront TMG replaces the asterisk (*) with the name of each server in the farm when it checks connectivity. For example, if you have a server farm consisting of two servers with the names internal1 and internal2, Forefront TMG will use the URLs https://internal1/ and https://internal2/ for checking connectivity.

PROCEDURES

To monitor the connectivity of a Web server

  • Expand Forefront TMG Management, click the Monitoring node, and then click the Connectivity Verifiers tab.

Important

When you use an HTTP or HTTPS GET request to monitor connectivity, you can use a non-standard port for the traffic, for example: https://*:88/. If you do so, you must create an access rule allowing access from Forefront TMG to the Web farm over HTTP or HTTPS on the specified port.
The Send an HTTP/HTTPS GET request option is supported only for servers whose names do not contain non-English characters.

Concepts

About server farms